Pegah Ahmadi was born in Tehran in 1974. She is the author of three volumes of poetry, On the Ending G, Cadence, and These Days of Mine Are A Throat, an interweaving of modern Farsi and ancient Persian, in which she explores the history of cruelty against women in , criticizing the Islamic religion and its influence on Iran’s social-political situation, published in 2002. That same year, she also published a translation of poetry by Sylvia Plath entitled Mad Girl’s Love Song, and collected, edited, introduced and published an anthology gathering the work of Iranian women poets, both historical and contemporary. Shortly after, she was banned from publishing poetry in her home country, except, in a limited manner, through online venues run by exiled Iranian writers. In 2009, following her involvement in the Green Movement’s demonstrations against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, she was threatened with imprisonment, and left Iran with the assistance of the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN), which placed her as a guest writer in the city-of-refuge site in Frankfurt, Germany. During her years in Frankfurt her long unpublished book, I Was Not Cold, translated into German by Jutta Himmelreich, was published by Sujet Verlag in Berlin. Ahmadi is in residence at Brown for the 2011-12 academic year.

Born in Tehran in 1938, Bahram Beyzaie is a well known Iranian critic, researcher, teacher, playwright, stage director (and producer), screenwriter and filmmaker (director, producer and editor) who has written more than 35 plays and more than 50 screenplays, including feature films Downpour, The Stranger and The Fog, The Crowd, Death of Yazdgerd, and Bashu, the Little Stranger. His work has been widely translated, and was first introduced to western audiences when he was 25, through a production of his work at the Festival du Theater des Nations in Paris, 1963. Professor and Chair of the Dramatic Arts Department at Tehran University until the Islamic revolution, he is at present a visiting professor at ’s Iranian Studies Program, where he lectures on such topics as Iranian Cinema, Iranian Theater, and Cinema and Mythology. Joumana Haddad is a renowned Lebanese poet, translator, and journalist. She is head of the Cultural pages for the prestigious "An Nahar" newspaper, as well as the editor-in-chief of Jasad Magazine, a controversial Arabic magazine specializing in the literature and arts of the body. She has published several poetry collections, widely acclaimed by critics, including original books in Italian, English, French and Spanish, in addition to Arabic. She has

also published several works of translation, including an anthology of 150 poets who committed suicide in the 20th century. Her most recent publication, an essay on Arab women entitled “I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman,” (Lawrence Hill Books, Chicago), has been translated to 13 languages. The sequel, “Superman is an Arab: On God, Marriage, Macho Men and Other Disastrous Inventions,” will appear in September 2012.

Masha Hamilton is the author of four acclaimed novels, most recently 31 Hours, which the Washington Post called one of the best novels of 2009 and independent bookstores named an Indie choice. She also founded two world literacy projects, the Camel Book Drive and the Afghan Women's Writing Project. She is the winner of the 2010 Women's National Book Association award, presented "to a living American woman who derives part or all of her income from books and allied arts, and who has done meritorious work in the world of books beyond the duties or responsibilities of her profession or occupation." She began her career as a full-time journalist, working in Maine, Indiana and before being sent by the Associated Press to the Middle East, where she was news editor for five years, including the period of the first intefadeh, and then moving to Moscow, where she worked for five years during the collapse of Communism, reporting for the Los Angeles Times and NBC-Mutual Radio and writing a monthly column, "Postcards from Moscow." She also reported from Kenya in 2006, and from Afghanistan in 2004 and 2008.

Sara Khalili is an editor and translator of contemporary Iranian literature. Her translations include Shahriar Mandanipour’s novel Censoring an Iranian Love Story and Shahrnush Parsipur’s Prison Memoir. She was awarded the 2007 PEN Translation Fund Award for her translation of Seasons of Purgatory, a collection of short stories by Mandanipour. Her short story translations have appeared in The Literary Review, The Kenyon Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Words Without Borders, PEN America, and the anthology Bound to Last. She has also translated several collections of poetry, among them The Sorrow of Solitude, Poems of Forough Farrokhzad; My Country, I Shall Build You Again, Poems of Simin Behbahani; As Red as Fire Tasting of Smoke, Selected Poems of Siavash Kasraii. Sara was also a contributing translator to Strange Times My Dear: A PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature.

Ron Leshem is an author and scriptwriter whose novel, Beaufort, was the recipient of the 2006 Sapir Prize, Israel’s top literary award. Widely translated, Beaufort was released in English by Random House in 2008. The film version of the novel, which Leshem coauthored, was nominated for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and won the Berlin International Film Festival Silver Bear for Best Director. Beaufort has been hailed – not only by critics but by the generation of soldiers who served in Lebanon during Israeli occupation – as the true voice of that period. Leshem has served as journalist and senior editor for Israeli dailies Yedioth Ahronoth and Ma'ariv. In 2006 he became deputy director for content and programming for Channel 2, Israel's main commercial TV network.

Abbas Milani is the Hamid & Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a Professor (by courtesy) in Division of International, Comparative, and Area Studies. He has been one of the founding co-directors of the Iran Democracy Project and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His expertise is U.S.-Iran relations as well as Iranian cultural, political, and security issues. Until 1986, he taught at Tehran University’s Faculty of Law and Political Science, where he was also a member of the Board of Directors of the university’s Center for International Relations. After moving to the United States, he was for fourteen years the Chair of the Political Science Department at the Notre Dame de Namur University. For eight years, he was a visiting Research Fellow in University of California, Berkeley’s Middle East Center.

Sheida Mohamadi, poet and fiction writer, was born in Tehran, Iran. She is the author of three books, a work of lyrical prose, Mahtab Delash ra Goshud, Banu! (The Moonlight Opened its Heart, Lady!); a novel, Afsaneh-ye Baba Leila (The Legend of Baba Leila); and a collection of poems, Aks-e Fowri-ye Eshqbazi (The Snapshot of Lovemaking). A new collection of her poems, Yavashhaye Ghermez (Crimson Whispers) is currently in press. She was Poet in Residence at University of Maryland in 2010. Her poems have been translated into different languages, including English, French, Turkish, Kurdish and Swedish.

Shahriar Mandanipour is the author of nine volumes of fiction, one nonfiction book, and more than 100 essays in genre such as literary theory, literature and art criticism, creative writing, censorship, and social commentary. His collections of short stories include The Eighth Day of the Earth, Violet Orient, Midday Moon,Mummy and Honey, Shadows of the Cave, and Ultramarine Blue. He is the author of the two-volume novel, The Courage of Love. From 1999 until 2007, he was Editor-in-Chief of Asr-e Panjshanbeh (Thursday Evening), a monthly literary journal published in Shiraz that after nine years of publishing was banned by Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. His first novel to appear in English, Censoring an Iranian Love Story, translated by Sara Khalili and published by Knopf in 2009, was well received. The New Yorker named it as one of the reviewers’ favorites of 2009, and NPR named it one of the best debut novels of the year. Censoring An Iranian Love Story is also being translated and published in 11 other languages in countries throughout the world. Mandanipour’s honors include the Mehregan Award for the best Iranian children’s novel of 2004, the 1998 Golden Tablet Award for best fiction in Iran during the previous two decades, and Best Film Critique at the 1994 Press Festival in Tehran.

Daniyal Mueenuddin was brought up in Lahore, Pakistan and Elroy, Wisconsin. For his book In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, he was the 2010 winner of The Story Prize, an annual book award for short story collections—as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and the LA Times Book Prize. His National Book Award Citation read "One of the best new story writers in America lives on a farm in Pakistan. A large cast of characters passes through his pages, giving us a wonderful sense of the strata of contemporary Pakistan, and, miraculously, a sharp sense of our own lives." The Daily Beast wrote, "In Other Rooms, Other Wonders reveals a modern Pakistan that is as beautiful as it is brutal…[His] work evokes 19th-century Russian masters like Turgenev and Gogol, along with the Southern Gothic tradition of Faulkner and Truman Capote…Mueenuddin is a prodigiously talented writer, capable of imagining the inner lives of Punjabi aristocrats and their servants with equal sympathy, precision and power.”

Mohsen Namjoo, an Iranian artist, songwriter, singer, music scholar and setar (traditional Persian lute) player, has been described in The New York Times as the “Bob Dylan of Iran.” Among his albums are Toranj (released in Iran in 2007), Oy, Useless Kisses, and Alaki. He has composed soundtracks for movies and plays, and was featured in the documentary Sounds of Silence, directed by Amir Hamz and Mark Lazarz. In 2006, he was sentenced in absentia to a five-year jail term by the Iranian revolutionary courts for allegedly ridiculing the ash- Shams, a sura of the Qur’an, in his song “Shams.” His first performance outside Iran took place in 2006 at the International Rotterdam Film Festival; in 2008, he kicked off his first U.S. solo tour. His unique musical style resembles a patchwork of the classical Persian poetry of , Rumi, or Saadi with western rock, blues, and jazz.

Iranian novelist Shahrnush Parsipur, born in Tehran, Iran, in 1946, is no stranger to political opposition. A woman who writes about hot-button issues like lousy marriages and female virginity, Parsipur has seen all of her books – eight works of fiction and a memoir – banned in her native land. She’s been imprisoned for her writings four times, once for nearly five years, from 1981 to 1986. Parsipur’s writing career began in 1974 with the publication of her first novel, The Dog and The Long Winter, in which a tradition-bound young woman encounters the revolutionary activism of her brother and his friends. Parsipur’s later works, like Touba and the Meaning of Night and Women Without Men (a title alluding to Ernest Hemingway’s Men Without Women), openly explore the condition of women in Iran. Parsipur’s characters speak unabashedly of women’s sexual oppression, ridicule chastity, and express their resistance to Iran’s male-dominated culture. Indeed, Women Without Men was considered provocative enough in Iran that it landed Parsipur in prison twice, in 1990 and 1991. Now a political refugee, Parsipur has lived in the U.S. since 1994 when she received a Lillian Hellman/Dashiell Hammett Award from the Fund for Free Expression. She is a former Brown International Writers Project Fellow (2004). The award-winning film based on her novel, Women Without Men, directed by , was released in 2010. Her new book, Prison Memoir, is forthcoming from The Feminist Press.

Egyptian writer and journalist Sondos Shabayek wrote, performed in and co-directed The Bussy Project, a reworking of the play The Vagina Monologues, in which men and women talk about sexual oppression, privacy, freedom, and harassment in the Middle East. She is also the director of Tahrir Monologues, stories about the 2011 Egyptian uprising.